The team of experts from Rotterdam visited Surat city during 11-15 March, 2019 and reviewed various facilities available in the city. They have visited number of places during a week-long visit along with some Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) officials. The team visited water treatment plants at Katargam and Kosad , Weir cum causeway at Singapore , Tertiary treatment plant at Kavi Kalapi garden and Science centre.

Reviewing the water treatment plants, the team’s water management experts offered help and expertise to make the river water more potable by developing a modern river water quality monitoring mechanism. They will come out with exact plan that needs to be done to improve the systems and provide better quality water to people. They will also help the civic body in weather forecasting and developing two new concepts of water plaza and blue roof scape for the city’s needs on the lines of Rotterdam city.

On this occasion, the municipal commissioner of Surat, ‎Shri M. Thennarasan, IAS has said, “We are very fortunate to have Rotterdam city as our pairing partner under EU’s International Urban Cooperation program. We had initially visited Rotterdam city and found their water management program very attractive and useful for Surat city. We intend to exchange some best practices in the areas of water supply, waste water, river rejuvenation and online water monitoring with Rotterdam city ”

Bharat Dalal, city engineer said, “In Europe, they use much advanced river water quality monitoring system. It informs in advance the quality of water that is likely to flow in the river from upstream. In this censor-based system, it will give an opportunity downstream whether to divert the highly polluted water or bring about a change in the water treatment system to suit the needs.”

According to Dalal, if the water flowing upstream in Tapi is highly contaminated from sewerage or other impurities and the COD or BOD or OD is above prescribed value, the civic body will get the information in advance and can treat it as per the needs.

The chief resilient officer (CRO) from Rotterdam, Mr. Armond Molenar has said that we have an long standing partnership with Surat city and every time, we come here we found real time, tangible growth and development. We are very delighted to work with Surat on specific areas of urban water management and hope to achieve improvements in service level deliveries in the longer run.